Sack of Katorz
|side2= |side3= |side4= |commanders1=(To be added) |commanders2=(To be added) |commanders3= |commanders4= |forces1=(To be added) |forces2=(To be added) |forces3= |forces4= |casual1=(To be added) |casual2=(To be added) |casual3= |casual4= }} The Sack of Katorz was an Insurrectionist offensive early on in the Wars of Expansion, launched against the Loyalist defenders of the fortress system of Katorz and the worlds it protected in the wider Katorz Holdfast. The Adamant Stars Katorz was famed as a fortress system without a single planet. Its civilisation was instead spread across a host of void-stations, the largest of which was a moon-sized construct from the Dark Age of Technology. Hollow and lifeless, it had been home to a corsair empire until the Imperium chanced upon it. Strategists had recognised its potential from the start, and when Niklaas expanded his program of fortification into the outer reaches of Segmentum Solar, Katorz had been among the systems he took and fashioned into an almost impregnable fortress. It was one of the furthest from Terra, sitting just within Segmentum Solar. Moreover, it was joined by a Warp channel to Ysta and the outer worlds of the Commena Cluster. Colonists from a dozen void enclaves in Segmentum Solar, mostly Saturn and Jupiter, had made their way there when Katorz was first discovered sixty years after the Crusade’s beginning. Among them were the scions of noble dynasties, who found their ambitions hampered by the predominance of Terra within the Sol System. They sought a system where their culture could flower to its full potential, and the vast structure they called Katorz Aleph seemed the perfect fit for their ambitions. Thus they turned it into a void city to rival even a Terran hive and built a great system of enclaves and shipyards around it. As the new territory was established, the inhabitants founded strong military forces, naturally modelled on the Solar Auxilia pattern and well supplied by great manufactorum facilities. Several cohorts were raised and dispatched to the many war fronts of the Great Crusade over the decades. However, a growing number patrolled Katorz and the surrounding systems, venturing forth at times to subdue rebellions and destroy xenos threats. By the time of the Insurrection, the Katorz Destructivists were counted among the most respected of their kind within the Segmentum. The nearby Forge World of Hatross saw to the running of the system’s manufactoria, adding forces of their own to its garrison. The two polities grew into a symbiotic relationship as Katorz became a key staging point for Imperial expeditions into the Galactic south and and outer reaches of the Maelstrom zone. Notable among these were the relief forces dispatched during the Crisis of the Hungering Gyre and the mighty host that Pionus Santor assembled to intervene in the Qarith Crusade. Katorz’s armies joined those expeditions, just as they contributed to most of the forces that passed through the system. Besides the regional defence fleet, Katorz had played host to several flotillas at the beginning of the Wars of Expansion, although many of these had been siphoned off for the doomed muster at Ysta in the weeks and months that followed. Among them were the ragged survivors of Legiones Astartes fleets ambushed on the Day of Revelation. In the main these belonged to the Halcyon Wardens, but two months after that infamous day, a handful of Crimson Lions ships had arrived, having barely escaped an ambush by a VIIth Legion force. At Katorz they found some measure of respite, but it was not to last. The Jackals of the Outer Dark The III Legion ships had been undergoing repairs for three weeks when the first reports came of fighting; not in the Commena Cluster beyond, but much closer to home. Corsair clans had roamed deep into Imperial space from above the Galactic plane, bypassing stronghold systems via the stricken Commena Cluster and Coronid Depths. Opportunistic raids marked their passage, great quantities of freight and people stolen away before nearby forces could respond, while small defence fleets were ambushed and savaged, exposing more systems to pillaging. Their kind were familiar, for many civilisations both human and xenos had devolved into banditry, preying like wolves on other societies. Indeed, as noted above, one such clan had made Katorz their home until the Imperium wrested it from them. Hundreds of their ilk had been pursued by the Emperor’s fleets, occasionally brought to His light and turned to His service, but more often subjugated or destroyed. These particular corsairs belonged to a variety of clans, and following their initial raids, Imperial savants were charged with examining the varied icons under which they sailed and the vessels, weapons and tactics they employed. Then a second task began as this bewildering array of symbols were cross-referenced with the voluminous records in the region’s strategic archives. Those who ruled Katorz and commanded its armies were troubled by their own ignorance and sought any intelligence they could uncover. In several cases, it emerged that the corsairs’ existence was at least hinted at in the archives, but those same records indicated that they had been pacified or destroyed. Now they appeared in numbers never hinted at, belonging to at least eight different major groupings and leaving broken fleets in their wake wherever they struck. Even more ominously, Imperial-pattern craft and vessels were sighted among their flotillas, suggesting that Icarion had cultivated and concealed these forces long in advance, feeding their growth and directing their paths of attack. Loyalist forces, already stretched by the spreading discord, were entirely unready for these marauders, so far from the front lines. Hunter and Hunted Captain D’tama of the Predators was the first to perceive a pattern in the incursions, approximately four weeks after they began. Despite the fragmentary data, he deduced that the marauders, despite their disparate nature, were concentrating their attacks along the major Warp routes that linked Katorz with other key parts of the Tayargund Reaches. This he took to be a part of the Insurrectionist offensive against the Commena Cluster, which was now all but unstoppable with the conquest of Commena Prime. D’tama brought his suspicions to the ad hoc war council which now governed Katorz and the surrounding region. The raiders, destructive as they had proved, had not sought confrontations with Loyalist fleets above a certain size and strength. Indeed, they had been observed to turn tail and flee when confronted in force, and none of the corsair flotillas fielded more than a few capital-class vessels. Moreover, these were no larger than an Imperial strike cruiser. None of this came as a surprise to the seasoned commanders of Katorz, given that they had gone undetected by the wider Imperium. D’tama’s diagnosis was that they had been assigned by Icarion to harass the Loyalists, preventing any interference in the Coronid Depths and the Commena Cluster. At the same time, he believed, they threatened Katorz’s own security, perhaps foreshadowing another assault. It was difficult to sift allied messages from Insurrectionist propaganda, but all the signs pointed towards the main forces of the Grave Stalkers, Eagle Warriors and Drowned beginning operations in systems only a few months’ voyage away. An offensive against Katorz was not hard to imagine. The council quickly concluded that the solution must be to tie up and destroy the corsairs, freeing their assets up if not to intervene in Commena, then to solidify their own defences. The Navigator House of Delphineus, a skilled and powerful branch of the local Navis Nobilite, offered their aid in devising a solution, exploiting their unrivalled knowledge of the region’s arteria. From this basis, a plan was drawn. Fleets would be carefully divided and set to lie in wait in systems identified as potential targets. The corsairs would be engaged by foes that alone would not withstand them, then surrounded by concealed ships and broken. Any survivors would be doomed to a perilous retreat, and the defenders would have a potent morale-booster. It was as well-drawn a plan as any of its kind, displaying a laudable pragmatism on the part of the council and respectable understanding of the threat they faced. Yet they failed to the perceive the hand at work behind the scheme, working with infinite subtlety to arrange the very strategies of its enemies to achieve its ends. For just as Katorz had been identified by the Steel Prince as a fine bulwark, it had long been uppermost in the thoughts of the Stormlord, who regarded it as both a hazard and prize. With his most senior Sentinels fighting elsewhere, the Loyalists did not expect the Harbingers to make any other forays except to reinforce their gains. But then, no praetor was assigned overall command of this invasion. The Spear of Insurrection The bait was taken by the corsairs in the four systems where the Loyalists had laid their traps, only for fleets of Ist Legion ships to follow in their wake. Hunters became the hunted, and the defenders were annihilated, the Harbingers inflicting damage which far exceeded their numbers. Worse, the nature of the plan had demanded the use of fast-moving and heavily armed vessels, and thus drew extensively on the Loyalist Legion forces and Solar Auxilia in the region. Thus in a few short days, the Harbingers had reduced the Legion presence among the defenders by over half. The Crimson Lions refused outright to fall back in the face of the arch-traitors, paying for their fervour with annihilation. Then disaster was piled upon disaster as the Harbingers and their allies descended on the now vulnerable worlds in each system. Their morale already in tatters, the planetary defence forces each collapsed in a matter of hours. Marshal Vaerela Elaku and Voiavos, Magos Militant of the Taghmata Hatross, had been left in overall command at Katorz, watching the shifting strategic landscape with mounting horror. The anticipated offensive had come with unimaginable speed, leaving her and her staff to desperately recall every fleet available to them and make safe the core system. And then, quite suddenly, there was no time for that either. A report came of a fleet entering the system, followed by auspex returns which were turned the defenders’ world on its head. Icarion Anasem had arrived, utterly unforeseen, on their doorstep. The Stormlord’s work in suborning and subverting elements of the Imperium had gone far beyond cultivating military allies. In the case of Katorz, he had solicited those who were not bound by oaths of service to the system or the loyal Legions. Instead he had sought a faction who were no strangers to political and occasional internecine violence; he approached the Navigator House of Delphineus. With promises of power and prestige he won them to his side, and their guidance brought his fleet to Katorz, evading every fleet and waystation. The Thunderchild had broken the veil some way outside the system, the fleet bypassing the outer defences just as Athrawes had at Commena. It was a majestic vessel, hawk-swift and deadly, a masterwork to stand proud beside any other product of the Imperium’s many shipyards. On its prow, pre-firing energies sparked across lances, while along flanks over twenty kilometres long, guns the size of Imperator Titans were run out. It was surrounded by battleships and strike cruisers which were themselves vast, mighty engines of war, yet they seemed as diminished in its presence as a Rhino tank or Land Raider beside a Mastodon. The measures taken against the corsairs had denuded the defence fleet in the Katorz system itself. Between that gambit and the prior pressures of the war, a fleet that had normally been maintained at six hundred vessels had been reduced to less than half that number. In any case, not one ship in the region could hope to match the Thunderchild. The Harbingers were outnumbered, but accompanied again by Akiran warships, they far outclassed and outgunned the bulk of their fearful opponents. The only truly dangerous elements belonged to the Katorz Destructivists, the Hatross Mechanicum and the few Legion vessels left in the system. The Harbingers struck them first, enveloping them with salvo upon salvo. The Thunderchild alone was a fleet-killer, and the other battleships were all proven forces in their own right. The heart of the enemy fleet was torn from it with shocking speed. Icarion gave hardly any attention to the rest of the Loyalist fleet once that was done, instead delegating their destruction to other shipmasters. His wrath was reserved for the void stations themselves, bristling as they were with vast static defences. Yet they were designed to operate in conjunction with voidships, and the precision of the Harbingers’ attack served to negate the advantage of their firepower. Katorz Aleph was their target, and they approached it with ruthless focus. Formed up into spearheads and approaching in corkscrewing trajectories, they evaded the fusillades and concentrated their fire on a small portion of the station’s shields. Against this expert deployment, the vast defences were rendered strangely impotent, unable to find a mark. Stripping the visible hemisphere of its localised shields, Icarion destroyed many of the cannons arrayed behind them and laid the station bare to the Harbingers’ direct attack; boarding torpedoes and assault rams. Guided by the foresight of the Stormborn’s most potent diviners, they shot straight for the locations which would allow them to storm the hangars and press on for the locations from which Katorz Aleph was controlled. For all their fear, and despite the suddenness of Icarion’s attack, this was an eventuality for which the defenders had drilled incessantly since the news of conflict reached them. Tens of thousands of Katorz Destructivists and Skitarii rushed to intercept the Harbingers. Armouries were thrown open and guns issued to many thousands of menials. The former were well-ordered and emboldened by the presence of veterans who had fought in the Qarith War, while the tech-guard were shorn of fear and guided by their archimandrite, who watched the battle through the eyes of all his troops. In the confined spaces they met their enemies with great torrents of las-fire and Galvanic bullets, massed so that the enemy could not prevent lucky shots from finding eye-lenses and the gaps between armour plates. Servitor-controlled turrets chattered to life; Niklaas and his warriors had fortified the interior of Katorz Aleph as well as the exterior. Battle-automata added heavier firepower to the storm, capable of shredding even power armour. But the Harbingers brought superior weapons to bear. Breachers raised their shields and strode through the volleys of their enemies. Heavy support squads armed with las cannons and volkite culverins turned whole companies to ash while assault and despoiler marines left trails of gore in their wake. Terminators and Dreadnoughts matched battle-automata for weight of fire and sheer strength. All of these were directed by minds which exceeded even Voiavos in their knowledge of warfare, and Icarion knew the strengths and weaknesses of the Mechanicum as anyone outside the priesthood. The Stormlord's Onslaught The Harbingers had accepted that losses would be heavy, and endured the counter-assaults to establish their foothold. Already the hangar doors had been flung open for Ist Legion reinforcements, to be delivered by Stormbird and Thunderhawk. If the enemy still contested those hangars, then they were swallowed up by heavy bolter fire or incinerated by volkite-equipped Ash Phoenix gunships. Thousands of Legionaries joined the battle, and with them came their Primarch. On the lesser stations, the Loyalists watched aghast, most paralysed by shock and the terror which Icarion had so adroitly sowed. Destructivists and Mechanicum troops boarded gunships and launched into the void, but the Insurrectionist ships patrolled sharklike around their strike zone, destroying any craft which dared attack them or attempt to run the gauntlet. Leaving command of the void battle to Tukuan, Archmagos Militant of Akira, Icarion stepped from his Stormbird into the anarchy on Katorz Aleph. With him was the core of the Second Maniple, the garrison of the Thunderchild and his personal force in effect. Some three hundred of them were Terminators, the Volta elite joined by a new force; the fearsome Vortices, armed for savage close combat where their brethren favoured gunnery. Nothing on that station withstood their assault. The first waves of Harbingers had slowed and halted in the face of the Loyalist resistance, only to part as the second crashed into the Loyalist machines. Icarion seemed to have become the very embodiment of the storm, a blur of blades and lightning which arced through the iron maniples. No shot or blow managed more than a glancing strike, Icarion evading blows from which even his gene-gifted reflexes should not have saved him. His spear made a mockery of even Mechanicum battleplate, for it had been forged in ages past, imbued with devices and powers that the tech-priests could only dream of. The Destructivists and Skitarii held firm, but their fate was sealed. The Harbingers simply dismembered them, carpeting the causeways and passages of the vast city and the automata only lasted a little longer. Stragglers were cut down by the thousands of Rakurai who followed behind the Astartes. Within six hours of the first boarding parties entering, the Insurrectionists had broken into the habitation zones and set about subjugating the terrified people within. Resistance earned only a swift and efficient death. The hab-districts fell quickly. Vorax, Domitar, Baharat; all stood before Icarion and all fell as the Stormlord cut a path to the governance chambers from which Marshal Elaku was still directing the mortal defenders. Skitarii and Harbingers crossed blades, their power fields sizzling and shrieking above the crash and roar of the fighting, and the Harbingers mastery was the greater. Not one blade got past Icarion’s spear, ever weaving to stab and slice at his foes. Voiavos confronted the Primarch with a blazing power axe that symbolised his power, and their duel raged across the gantries that led to the innermost core of Katorz Aleph. Icarion had the victory, severing the Mechanicum general’s servo-limbs before impaling and burning him out with the energies of his spear. The Hatross Taghmata was left directionless, many of their automata embarking on rampages which did as much harm to their own side as they did to the Harbingers. But to their great credit, the Destructivists and a large part of the armed menials clung on in defence of the realm their forebears had built. They sold their lives to the last, even when the bulkheads were wrenched open by the Vortice Terminators and Icarion set foot in the heart of Katorz Aleph. But their valour could not change the facts. Victory had gone to the Harbingers, and all the Tayargund Reaches lay under the Insurrectionist boot. Under Shade of Stormclouds Marshal Elaku was taken alive despite her resistance, and publicly executed a day later as the Harbingers secured Katorz Aleph. The act was broadcast throughout the system, as astropathic missive carried the news of Icarion’s victory to the ears of any who still fought on. Morale shattered and now threatened with the station’s mammoth weapons, the rest of the system’s colonies knelt to the invader. The remaining XXth Legion vessels launched a furious but hopeless counter-assault on the system, dispatched by the Harbingers in a manner that suggested more lords on the hunt than a battle. The Halcyon Wardens, on the other hand, had admitted defeat and sailed for Loyalist space, pausing only to save what allied forces they could and take them with them, fending off the Harbingers ships that gave chase. Thus Icarion had his prize; a fortress which would anchor the new border between his realm and the Imperium, from which he would be able to cow the entire region into submission even as Commena fell to Athrawes and Xiutel, and Empyon carried the war further into the west. The Loyalist forces caught there, now far from help, would be picked off. Those that did survive would still serve the Stormlord’s plans in their escape, for the news they took with them would be a hammer blow to Loyalist hearts. His brothers and many other generals were likewise enacting their own rapid conquests, building an empire whose sole purpose was to swell until, cancer-like, it engulfed the entire Imperium. Every world under the Insurrectionist banner would serve this effort in one way or another. Already, fiefs in the Commena Cluster were being allocated to the Ember Host as a reward for their defection from the X Legion, and the Fire Keepers gene-seed taken in the conquest was given to them. The corsair clans were repaid for their long patience and loyalty with domains of their own, with many of their chieftains and lords assuming control over worlds which required the very harshest rule. People were pressed into Icarion’s armies by the million, or simply seized by the traitor Mechanicum for conversion into Adsecularis and servitors. Across thousands of worlds, forges and manufactoria were set to toil day and night, their populations living under the whip of Insurrectionist overseers. Fear and ambition caused men and women to spit on their oaths and pledge themselves to Icarion, and they sought to prove their fealty with ruthlessness. The noble memory of the Lightning Bearers was already darkening just as the I Legion’s livery had. By their deeds, first fratricide and now the conquest of those who had revered them, the Harbingers took on a far grimmer mien and reputation: haughty warriors who now took overlordship as their due where once they had been liberators. This was true of many of their allies, even those who had taken their side out of idealism like the Godslayers and Morning Stars, but nowhere was it more apparent than in those once hailed as the finest of all the Emperor’s armies. The horrified Loyalists had watched as realms they had believed secure had been engulfed and emerged as possessions of the turncoats. The initial shock of Icarion’s rebellion had given way to a steady flow of disasters, and these too only promised to be but the prelude to a greater struggle. The Loyalists dug in, the battered Legions and regiments working desperately to replace their lost strength, knowing that the strength of their adversary was only growing. Across their territory, unrest was quelled in bloody and merciless fashion just as Icarion’s collaborators exercised their power with brutality. And yet, as the Emperor remained silent and only the pronouncements of the Warmaster and Sigillite emerged from Terra, the poison of fear could not be expunged from the Imperium. Both sides knew that the time must come when Icarion struck for the Throneworld itself, and when that storm broke, it might sweep away all that the Emperor had built. Category:Wars of Expansion